r/ArtConnoisseur

Hidalgo finished this painting when he was thirty-four, after reading Dante’s Inferno during his time in Italy, and he poured all that into the damned crossing the Acheron toward Hades. The river water is dark and it seems to swallow all the light, from those waters you see figures rising as they try to get on the boat. On the right you see Charon, the ferryman, a figure covered in a dark cloak that matches the surrounding gloom.

Hidalgo’s approach to The Boat of Charon is in the charcoal studies he made of the ferryman before settling on the final composition. In those early drawings, now at the Lopez Museum and Library, Charon appears as a fully nude figure modeled after the Greco-Roman heroes of the Renaissance. Hidalgo lingered over the musculature and the stance, treating the boatman almost as a pagan divinity with great authority. But on the finished canvas, that same figure had his entire presence reduced to a colder and more remote one. That just shows you how carefully Hidalgo weighed the mood he wanted the underworld crossing to have.

After Hidalgo left Manila as a government pensionado in 1879, he settled for decades in Paris, where his studio on the Boulevard Arago became a gathering place for Filipino artists and exiles who found welcome there even while the painter himself kept largely apart from political agitation. He formed a lifelong attachment to Maria Yrritia, a woman who was both a model and companion for nearly forty years. When he finally brought her to Manila in 1909 hoping for his mother’s acceptance, the meeting ended in a refusal, and the pair returned to Europe. Hidalgo never married her. After his death in Barcelona in 1913, Maria accompanied the body back to the Philippines, then later set out once more with a collection of his paintings only to perish when the ship went down off the African coast.

In this painting we see a young knight in full armor, he holds a golden chalice in both hands, but his eyes have turned away from the drink and are instead on the sword beside him. There’s a faint halo over his head symbolising the vows he took.
To his right we see a woman, her body is curved toward him in a long dress. She stares at him as if she has already offered the wine and now waits for him to finish what has begun.

Hacker drew the moment from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which is a great collection of Arthurian tales. Sir Percival, pure of heart and bound for the Holy Grail, has already endured hunger and strange trials. A beautiful lady arrives by ship dressed in black silk, claiming knowledge of his fellow knight Galahad. She feeds him after three days without food and pours strong wine that clouds his judgment. Desire rises, they begin to undress, and then his eyes fall on the sword whose cross-shaped hilt reminds him of every oath he has sworn. He makes the sign of the cross and prays. In an instant the lady and her ship disappear into smoke. Percival feels how close he came to falling, he then wounds himself in penance, and continues on his path, eventually becoming one of the three knights who reach the Grail.

Arthur Hacker caried with him the discipline of his father’s craft into every canvas he touched. Edward Hacker had spent decades as a line engraver, etching animals and sporting scenes and his son seems to have inherited that same attention to detail. When Arthur entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1876 he already possessed a trained eye for depicting, and the years that followed in Léon Bonnat’s Paris atelier only sharpened it. There he learned to model form but he never abandoned the English taste for narrative that had surrounded him at home. The result appears in this piece, where the polished plates of the knight’s armor and the see-through folds of the woman’s gown feel perfectly balanced.

What makes this painting unique is the way Hacker’s travels through Spain and North Africa with his friend Solomon J. Solomon inspired the lighting. Those months spent moving from Madrid to Tangier taught him how southern sun can turn ordinary surfaces into something almost molten, and he brought that knowledge home. In this piece the late afternoon glow seems to choose what it will touch. The same journey also left him with a lifelong interest in the meeting of the sacred and the sensual, ideas he went to again and again.

This scene is in monochrome tones, the kind of that makes every feather and fold of fabric feel close enough to touch. Two cats are tucked under the covers of a simple bed. Among the cats one has it’s fur ruffled and an eye open, the other is mostly hidden in the covers. All across the bed and the headboard you see a crowd of owls.

Wain made this drawing a few years after the death of his wife Emily, who had passed from cancer in 1887. The couple had shared their home with a black and white cat named Peter, and sketching the animal had brought Emily comfort during her illness. As a boy Wain had recurring nightmares that left him unsettled for years, visions he later described as an endless surface that followed him through the streets and into his rooms. There is something about that early unease that seems to be here, translated into the stares of the owls and the postures of the cats under the covers.

What makes Wain’s relationship with cats even deeper is the theory he created around their bodies and the invisible forces he believed they had. He spoke of every cat as a small lightning conductor, its fur charged with electricity that pulled it to face north or south according to its own polarity, the points of its coat drawn by the magnetic poles of the earth. He once explained that Peter, the black and white cat who comforted Emily during her final illness, was a little electrical battery whose current passed into his wife and generated a heat between them.

Even after the darker years closed around him and he entered the long stretch of hospital life, Wain never stopped drawing the creatures that had shaped his entire career. Estimates of his lifetime output are over one hundred and fifty thousand cats, with some years seeing him produce more than a thousand individual illustrations. In the leafy grounds of Napsbury Hospital he continued to work, surrounded by the colony of cats that wandered the gardens.

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